Reflections on music

Tag Archives: Japan

A few years ago in Tokyo, following an intensive all-night jam, various patterns of geometric nature began to form on the back of Go Kurosawa’s eyelids. That’s what gave the young drummer the idea for a band name: Kikagaku Moyo, Japanese for “geometric patterns”.

The Tokyo-based psychedelic band, originally formed by Go Kurosawa (drums/vocals) and Tomo Katsurada (guitar/vocals) in the summer of 2012, gradually morphed into its current extended line-up, which includes three more members: Daoud Popal (guitar), Kotsu Guy (bass), and Go’s brother Ryu (sitar), who joined the band after studying with acclaimed classical sitar player Manilal Nag in India.

The band recently released its fourth album Masana Temples, recorded in Lisbon and produced by jazz musician Bruno Pernadas, in a conscious effort on behalf of the group to work with someone from a different background and challenge their own perceptions and ideas about psychedelic music.

An exotic -and at times explosive- blend of krautrock, folk, and Indian music, Kikagaku Moyo’s largely Improvisational music is an attempt to liberate both mind and body and create a “bridge between the supernatural and the present”.

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In their highly energetic live performance in Athens (which took place just a few weeks after another excellent concert by fellow Tokyo post-rockers MONO), the band brought successfully together all these diverse elements, rewarding their Greek fans through creating their very own kind of peculiar psychedelic geometry.

Formed in 1999 in Tokyo, Mono developed into one of the most prominent names in post-rock music, releasing 9 much acclaimed albums over the last couple of decades, with their 10th studio album scheduled to be released early next year.

Post-rock, however, is too vague and restrictive a term to fully do justice to Mono’s unique soundscapes, which seem to spring from a different dimension, taking their audiences to hitherto unexplored worlds. As an enthusiastic NME reviewer once put it: “Screw ‘Music For The People’, this is music for the gods.”

Indeed, as testified my Mono’s recent live performance in Athens, the band’s mind-blowing blend of experimental, ambient, and classical elements offers an experience that goes beyond mere musical satisfaction. The band’s dedication, seriousness and intensity signify some sort of musical ritual or initiation rather than just a live show, thus encouraging the audience to partake in a truly uplifting communal experience. Music, thus, seems to become a means to something higher rather than an end in itself.

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Mono’s guitar-based, lengthy instrumental pieces -kind of miniature ambient symphonies with rich dynamics and extensive use of reverb, distortion and delay effects- slowly take you in until you are, slowly but surely, completely absorbed into the magnificent and otherworldly atmosphere they evoke.

In the end, Mono’s music is about evolving, going deeper, and reaching higher. In a word, it’s about transcendence. As Takaakira Goto, the band’s lead guitarist, has put it: “Music is communicating the incommunicable; that means a term like post-rock doesn’t mean much to us, as the music needs to transcend genre to be meaningful”.

Like this:

While reading a collection of short stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892 – 1927), known as the “father of the Japanese short story”, I came across the following passage (it’s taken from his autobiographical story The Life of a Stupid Man, translated by Jay Rubin):

He suffered an onslaught of insomnia. His physical strength began to fade as well. (…) But he knew well enough what was wrong with him: he was ashamed of himself and afraid of them – afraid of the society he so despised.

One afternoon when snow clouds hung over the city, he was in the corner of a café, smoking a cigar and listening to music from the gramophone on the other side of the room. He found the music permeating his emotions in a strange new way. When it ended, he walked over to the gramophone to read the label on the record.

“Magic Flute – Mozart.”

All at once it became clear to him: Mozart too had broken the Ten Commandments and suffered. Probably not the way he had, but…

He bowed his head and returned to his table in silence.

I found this passage particularly powerful, as it manages to convey very elegantly one of music’s most intriguing characteristics: its universality, that is, its ability to reach straight into the hearts of people who lived under completely different social conditions and many hundreds years apart, forging a bond between all those who feel our common humanity through works such as Mozart’s sublime opera.